1. Field of Invention
The present invention pertains to a kitchen utensil used in the preparation of garlic for cooking. Specifically, it relates to the common kitchen garlic press.
2. Description of Prior Art
A common kitchen garlic press is constructed of a garlic chamber with a perforated sieve member in the bottom located near a hinge which joints two lever arms. The top lever arm operates a plunger which moves vertically within the chamber to squeeze garlic through the perforations. There are numerous existing patents for this type of garlic press with each one a minor variation of this fundamental design. Examples of these can be found in Lackie U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,370,044, Gibson 5,463,941, and Laib 5,467,699, etc.
In this type of garlic press, each clove of garlic should first be pre-peeled to avoid the peelings blocking the perforations. Then substantial pressure is required to force the closing of the two levers to squeeze on the clove of garlic.
There are several commonly recognized problems with garlic tools of this design:    1) Difficulty in use—requires pre-peeling of garlic cloves and strong wrist strength in pressing;    2) Substantial wastage—garlic bits remain in the chamber and perforations;    3) Pulverized garlic bits—may not be desirable for the intended use;    4) Difficulty in Cleaning—compressed garlic bits tend to get stuck in perforations and crevices.    5) Inadvertent garlic juice spray
There are several garlic tools on the market that attempts to alleviate the problem of difficult garlic pressing by having longer and bigger lever arms or with soft handles. Petronelli U.S. Pat. No. 4,582,265 presented a somewhat different approach by having a rotatable plunger with patterns on the plunger surface so that the garlic clove can be ground into finer particles before forced out of the perforations on the sieve member. Other existing patents specifically attempt to deal with the very real and undesirable cleaning problem by providing special cleaning device, or special non-stick surface such as presented by Ancona U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,520,104, Short et al. 6,237,474 and Moor 5,513,562, etc.
Such extraordinary efforts at improvement, however, only succeed at best in alleviating some of the noted disadvantages. So long as a garlic press retains the traditional two-lever, perforated sieve chamber design, all of the above-mentioned five problems clearly remain, if to a varying degree.
Other inventors also recognize such problems and attempts were made to design garlic tools that can overcome such shortcomings. These following paterts, Repac and Culig U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,947,016, Bigelow et al 6,244,529, Holcomb 4,537,123, a UK design patent 2039383, and an Australian reg.des. No. 114662 (also registered as UK reg. Des. No. 2,013,169) presented different cutters or graters that do not follow the traditional two lever, perforated sieve chamber design. Although such devices appear to be satisfactory for their designed purposes, since the devices have many separate parts, they are unnecessarily bulky, complicated, slow to operate, and have high production costs.
The above mentioned types of utensils tools represent almost all of the known kitchen garlic tools or the garlic presses. A common feature among all of them is that the processed garlic is forced to pass through multiple perforations on either a grater plate with raised tiny sharp cutting edges, or through a sieve member.
A different class of kitchen utensil that is not designed specifically for garlic preparation but nevertheless can be used for such purpose is the kitchen chopper. This can be in the shape of a cylindrical container about the size of a beaker having a vertically traveling member with attached cutter blades at its bottom. The traveling member is held up as its normal resting position by a spring means. The vertically traveling member can pressed down by hand chopping the material resting on the bottom of the container into fine bits. Another popular kitchen chopper most commonly used to prepare salsa has a pair of rotating blades inside a container. The material resting on the bottom is chopped up by cranking a handle on the top of the container rotating the chopping blades.
The main problem of using such kitchen choppers for garlic preparation is that they occupy a large space, they contain many parts and are expensive, processed garlic bits are difficult to gather etc. Simply put, they represent unwarranted overkill for the purpose of garlic preparation, with a result that is less than satisfactory.
A survey of the available cook books reveals that few cook book authors advocate the use of the commonly available garlic presses for garlic preparation presumably because of the problems previously mentioned. But instead, they provide detail instructions in how to properly prepare garlic cloves by using a kitchen knife, or pre-boiling, or pre-baking of the garlic clove. Unfortunately, all such efforts are either complicated requiring much skill and practice, or are slow and energy inefficient. All in all, garlic preparation in the kitchen has always been a slow, difficult, unpleasant, and daunting task.